A New Day, And MorphBlog, Dawns

Well, my friends, you can kiss this iteration of the MorphBlog goodbye. Google has been great to me, but I decided to move on with some homegrown WordPress and CSS I cooked up. From now on, all your blogs needs will be met here:

MORPHBLOG: don't fear change. change fear.
http://www.morphizm.com/css

For those of you who are feeding us into a reader of some sort, point your RSS and ATOM junkies this way going forward:

MorphBlog RSS FEED
http://morphizm.com/css/wp-rss.php
MorhBlog ATOM FEED
http://morphizm.com/css/wp-atom.php

For more information, go to the new MorphBlog Feeds page, where you can get the full news, plus locations for Morphizm's presence on YouTube, Imeem, Twitter and more.

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Lightning Strikes? Get Used to Them.

The Friday is withering away, and Saturday is another work day. That rhymes, but I don't have enough time to put it into song. And even if I did have enough time, I'd rather jam out a farewell to California, my favorite state on Earth. I spiel onward on the conflagration for my pals at AlterNet:

Lightning Strikes: Get Used to Catastrophic Wildfires and Worse
"This is a specter against which grand inquisitors and wars against terrorism are powerless to protect us," Mike Davis wrote in a 2003 essay titled "The Perfect Fire," which was composed against the backdrop of a massive firestorm that callously rampaged across Southern California, burning thousands of homes and billions of dollars in its wake. "It is, of course," he added, "the right time of the year for the end of the world."

It still is. In late June, an ahead-of-schedule dry lightning event sparked more than 8,000 strikes across California, setting off over 800 fires, many of which are still burning as I write. And if you're the praying type, you might want to start praying they can be put out before the conventional time window for such events arrives in late July and August.

"This doesn't bode well for the fire season," AccuWeather.com meteorologist Ken Clark told the Associated Press in June, shortly after the lightning hit. "We're not even into the meat of the fire season at this point, and the brush is extremely dry. It's not going to get any better," he added. "It's going to get worse."

How much worse? How much time have you got? You might want to spend it packing... MORE @ ALTERNET

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Post Up: Pinback, Dark Star, Breakfast Club

Greetings, Morphizm fans. It's been a long day at Wired, but I've got goodies. Some of them are named Pinback.

Digg's Kevin Rose Digs Pinback, Knife, More
Los Angeles radio staple KCRW has lately handed over its studio to a variety of all-stars from entertainment and culture for the Guest DJ Project. On Wednesday, it was Digg's turn to mix it up: Kevin Rose teamed up with DJ Raul Campos to spin five tunes that make life easier while programming a social networking phenomenon... MORE @ WIRED

Video: Speaking of Pinback, Dark Star and The Breakfast Club...
The San Diego duo has been around for years making addictive, hypnotic laptop pop, hopscotching from sci-fi classic to teen-angst soap without missing a backbeat.

Pinback originally formed around the turn of the 21st century, when bassist Zach Smith's other criminally underrated band Three Mile Pilot fragmented under the pressure of major-label headaches and interpersonal drama. The drama also caused 3MP's singer Pall Jenkins and pianist Tobias Nathaniel to create Black Heart Procession.

Rob Crow, on leave from one of his hundred other bands, including Heavy Vegetable, Thingy, Optigonally Yours and many more (including the riotous Goblin Cock), signed on with Smith shortly thereafter. Since then, the two turned out a series of compelling full-length efforts and EPs created in the comfort of their own homes and garages... MORE @ WIRED

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Post Up: What Is(n't) Shoegaze?

[I ponder loud thoughts, and hopefully kill crappy terminology, for my homeys at Wired. Long live the unclassifiable.]

Post Up: What Is(n't) Shoegaze?
"Shoegaze is a dumb term made up by clueless NME idiots," argues Mogwai's Stuart Brathwaite, a My Bloody Valentine fan as well as a friend of its architect Kevin Shields. "It's pretty demeaning as well. If someone called us shoegazers, I'd be pretty unhappy."

For good reason. During the late '80s and early '90s, the term reductively compressed the dense feedback, droning riffage and ethereal soundtracking into slang and slag, especially in the British press. No doubt, its employ was a byproduct of the British press having fallen in love with the derivative Britpop of Oasis, as much as America had fallen in love with the derivative metal of grunge.

But in the end, it was used to describe bands like My Bloody Valentine, Cocteau Twins, Swervedriver and pretty much anyone else, like drone minimalists Spacemen 3, who didn't fall into the comfortable confines of easily classifiable music... MORE @ WIRED

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The Real Nigerian Nightmare

[Back on you, Morphizm pals. I get deep on oil, Nigeria and geopolitical clusterfuckage for AlterNet.]

AlterNet: Africa, Victim in Our Quest for Cheap Oil
Whether or not we have fully arrived at peak oil can be left to the nitpickers and bean counters to decide. What we know for sure is that the cost of black gold has exponentially risen in just a few short years, and the global economy it is built upon is currently straddling a razor waiting for the inevitable slice. That final cut may come from Nigeria, where all the major oil companies have done business, dirty and otherwise, for the last five decades, degrading the environment and depressing the general population along the way.

That disturbing feedback loop is the subject of the new book Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta, which juxtaposes the arresting graphics of award-winning photojournalist Ed Kashi with the geopolitical insights of UC Berkeley professor Michael Watts to present Africa's most populous nation as a possible epicenter for the full-blown resource wars to come... MORE @ ALTERNET

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Post Up: HarcoDarko, RadioLasers, Who?

[Checking in from the static haze, Morphizm diehards. I've been hard at work for Wired and more, so let's share, shall we?]

Ed Harcourt Merges Glass and Drone For Donnie Darko Sequel
Ed Harcourt's recently released The Beautiful Lie is a far cry from his early work. Its emotional piano balladry sounds little like the experimental exercises found on Here Be Monsters or Maplewood. But his sonic diversity will come in handy when he tackles the film score for S. Darko, the sequel to the surprisingly successful indie sci-fi classic Donnie Darko.

Video: Radiohead Ditches Cameras, Activates Lasers
"So here we are in our lovely Florida cul-de-sac," Zoo Films director of photography Von Thomas explains. "We are scanning the geometry of [the] houses that we are going to vaporize."

The Who: Less Influential Than Def Leppard?
In a taping for VH1 on Saturday in Los Angeles, everyone from Pearl Jam, Tenacious D and Flaming Lips to X-Files spook David Duchovny, Office nerd Rainn Wilson and more showed up to fete The Who. The occasion was the taping of VH1 Rock Honors, a show that supposedly bows down to the rock icons that shaped music as we know it.

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Post Up: Give Peace a Price Tag

I spiel onward for Wired for money. For love, I learn CSS. It goes slowly.

Give Peace a Price Tag
Almost four decades ago, John Lennon and Yoko Ono piled Timothy Leary, Petula Clark, Dick Gregory, Allen Ginsberg, Tommy Smothers and many more into a Bed-In in a Montreal hotel room and recorded what may be the most famous protest song of all time using nothing but four mikes and an Ampex four-track. On Thursday, the hand-written lyrics to that immortal song, "Give Peace a Chance," were auctioned off by Christie's for the tidy sum of $833,654.

Money may not be ably to buy you love, but evidently it can buy you peace. Scratch that: It can buy you love too... MORE @ WIRED

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Disaster Capitalism's Extortion State

[Once again, we hand the floor to longtime Morphizm contributor Naomi Klein, who knows her way around a game theory. Or two. Especially the one that profits off either side of reconstruction.]

Disaster Capitalism: State of Extortion
by Naomi Klein
Once oil passed $140 a barrel, even the most rabidly right-wing media hosts had to prove their populist cred by devoting a portion of every show to bashing Big Oil. Some have gone so far as to invite me on for a friendly chat about an insidious new phenomenon: “disaster capitalism.” It usually goes well—until it doesn’t.

For instance, “independent conservative” radio host Jerry Doyle and I were having a perfectly amiable conversation about sleazy insurance companies and inept politicians when this happened: “I think I have a quick way to bring the prices down,” Doyle announced. “We’ve invested $650 billion to liberate a nation of 25 million people. Shouldn’t we just demand that they give us oil? There should be tankers after tankers backed up like a traffic jam getting into the Lincoln Tunnel, the Stinkin’ Lincoln, at rush hour with thank-you notes from the Iraqi government…. Why don’t we just take the oil? We’ve invested it liberating a country. I can have the problem solved of gas prices coming down in ten days, not ten years.”

There were a couple of problems with Doyle’s plan, of course. The first was that he was describing the biggest stickup in world history. The second, that he was too late: “We” are already heisting Iraq’s oil, or at least are on the cusp of doing so.

It’s been ten months since the publication of my book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, in which I argue that today’s preferred method of reshaping the world in the interest of multi-national corporations is to systematically exploit the state of fear and disorientation that accompanies moments of great shock and crisis. With the globe being rocked by multiple shocks, this seems like a good time to see how and where the strategy is being applied.

And the disaster capitalists have been busy—from private firefighters already on the scene in Northern California’s wildfires, to land grabs in cyclone-hit Burma, to the housing bill making its way through Congress. The bill contains little in the way of affordable housing, shifts the burden of mortgage default to taxpayers and makes sure that the banks that made bad loans get some payouts. No wonder it is known in the hallways of Congress as “The Credit Suisse Plan,” after one of the banks that generously proposed it.


Iraq Disaster: We Broke It, We (Just) Bought It

But these cases of disaster capitalism are amateurish compared with what is unfolding at Iraq’s oil ministry. It started with no-bid service contracts announced for ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP and Total (they have yet to be signed but are still on course). Paying multinationals for their technical expertise is not unusual. What is odd is that such contracts almost invariably go to oil service companies—not to the oil majors, whose work is exploring, producing and owning-carbon wealth. As London-based oil expert Greg Muttitt points out, the contracts make sense only in the context of reports that the oil majors have insisted on the right of first refusal on subsequent contracts handed out to manage and produce Iraq’s oil fields. In other words, other companies will be free to bid on those future contracts, but these companies will win.

One week after the no-bid service deals were announced, the world caught its first glimpse of the real prize. After years of back-room arm-twisting, Iraq is officially flinging open six of its major oil fields, accounting for around half of its known reserves, to foreign investors. According to Iraq’s oil minister, the long-term contracts will be signed within a year. While ostensibly under control of the Iraq National Oil Company, foreign firms will keep 75 percent of the value of the contracts, leaving just 25 percent for their Iraqi partners.

That kind of ratio is unheard of in oil-rich Arab and Persian states, where achieving majority national control over oil was the defining victory of anti-colonial struggles. According to Muttitt, the assumption until now was that foreign multinationals would be brought in to develop brand-new fields in Iraq—not to take over ones that are already in production and therefore require minimal technical support. “The policy was always to allocate these fields to the Iraq National Oil Company,” he told me. This is a total reversal of that policy, giving INOC a mere 25 percent instead of the planned 100 percent.

So what makes such lousy deals possible in Iraq, which has already suffered so much? Ironically, it is Iraq’s suffering—its never-ending crisis—that is the rationale for an arrangement that threatens to drain its treasury of its main source of revenue. The logic goes like this: Iraq’s oil industry needs foreign expertise because years of punishing sanctions starved it of new technology and the invasion and continuing violence degraded it further. And Iraq urgently needs to start producing more oil. Why? Again because of the war. The country is shattered, and the billions handed out in no-bid contracts to Western firms have failed to rebuild the country. And that’s where the new no-bid contracts come in: they will raise more money, but Iraq has become such a treacherous place that the oil majors must be induced to take the risk of investing. Thus the invasion of Iraq neatly creates the argument for its subsequent pillage.

Several of the architects of the Iraq War no longer even bother to deny that oil was a major motivator. On National Public Radio’s To the Point, Fadhil Chalabi, one of the primary Iraqi advisers to the Bush Administration in the lead-up to the invasion, recently described the war as “a strategic move on the part of the United States of America and the UK to have a military presence in the Gulf in order to secure [oil] supplies in the future.” Chalabi, who served as Iraq’s oil under-secretary and met with the oil majors before the invasion, described this as “a primary objective.”

Invading countries to seize their natural resources is illegal under the Geneva Conventions. That means that the huge task of rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure—including its oil infrastructure—is the financial responsibility of Iraq’s invaders. They should be forced to pay reparations. (Recall that Saddam Hussein’s regime paid $9 billion to Kuwait in reparations for its 1990 invasion.) Instead, Iraq is being forced to sell 75 percent of its national patrimony to pay the bills for its own illegal invasion and occupation.


Oil Price Shock: Give Us the Arctic or Never Drive Again

Iraq isn’t the only country in the midst of an oil-related stickup. The Bush Administration is busily using a related crisis—the soaring price of fuel—to revive its dream of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). And of drilling offshore. And in the rock-solid shale of the Green River Basin. “Congress must face a hard reality,” said George W. Bush on June 18. “Unless members are willing to accept gas prices at today’s painful levels—or even higher—our nation must produce more oil.”

This is the President as Extortionist in Chief, with gas nozzle pointed to the head of his hostage—which happens to be the entire country. Give me ANWR, or everyone has to spend their summer vacations in the backyard. A final stickup from the cowboy President.

Despite the Drill Here. Drill Now. Pay Less bumper stickers, drilling in ANWR would have little discernible impact on actual global oil supplies, as its advocates well know. The argument that it could nonetheless bring down oil prices is based not on hard economics but on market psychoanalysis: drilling would “send a message” to the oil traders that more oil is on the way, which would cause them to start betting down the price.

Two points follow from this approach. First, trying to psych out hyperactive commodity traders is what passes for governing in the Bush era, even in the midst of a national emergency. Second, it will never work. If there is one thing we can predict from the oil market’s recent behavior, it is that the price is going to keep going up regardless of what new supplies are announced.

Take the massive oil boom under way in Alberta’s notorious tar sands. The tar sands (sometimes called the oil sands) have the same things going for them as Bush’s proposed drill sites: they are nearby and perfectly secure, since the North American Free Trade Agreement contains a provision barring Canada from cutting off supply to the United States. And with little fanfare, oil from this largely untapped source has been pouring into the market, so much so that Canada is now the largest supplier of oil to the United States, surpassing Saudi Arabia. Between 2005 and 2007, Canada increased its exports to the States by almost 100 million barrels. Yet despite this significant increase in secure supplies, oil prices have been going up the entire time.

What is driving the ANWR push is not facts but pure shock doctrine strategy—the oil crisis has created the conditions in which it is possible to sell a previously unsellable (but highly profitable) policy.


Food Price Shock: Genetic Modification or Starvation

Intimately connected to the price of oil is the global food crisis. Not only do high gas prices drive up food costs but the boom in agrofuels has blurred the line between food and fuel, pushing food growers off their land and encouraging rampant speculation. Several Latin American countries have been pushing to re-examine the push for agrofuels and to have food recognized as a human right, not a mere commodity. United States Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte has other ideas. In the same speech touting the US commitment to emergency food aid, he called on countries to lower their “export restrictions and high tariffs” and eliminate “barriers to use of innovative plant and animal production technologies, including biotechnology.” This was an admittedly more subtle stickup, but the message was clear: impoverished countries had better crack open their agricultural markets to American products and genetically modified seeds, or they could risk having their aid cut off.

Genetically modified crops have emerged as the cure-all for the food crisis, at least according to the World Bank, the European Commission president (time to “bite the bullet”) and Prime Minister of Britain Gordon Brown. And, of course, the agribusiness companies. “You cannot today feed the world without genetically modified organisms,” Peter Brabeck, chairman of Nestlé, told the Financial Times recently. The problem with this argument, at least for now, is that there is no evidence that GMOs increase crop yields, and they often decrease them.

But even if there was a simple key to solving the global food crisis, would we really want it in the hands of the Nestlés and Monsantos? What would it cost us to use it? In recent months Monsanto, Syngenta and BASF have been frenetically buying up patents on so-called “climate ready” seeds—plants that can grow in earth parched from drought and salinated from flooding.

In other words, plants built to survive a future of climate chaos. We already know the lengths Monsanto will go to protect its intellectual property, spying on and suing farmers who dare to save their seeds from one year to the next. We have seen patented AIDS medications fail to treat millions in sub-Saharan Africa. Why would patented “climate ready” crops be any different?

Meanwhile, amid all the talk of exciting new genetic and drilling technologies, the Bush Administration announced a moratorium of up to two years on new solar energy projects on federal lands—due, apparently, to environmental concerns. This is the final frontier for disaster capitalism. Our leaders are failing to invest in technology that will actually prevent a future of climate chaos, choosing instead to work hand in hand with those plotting innovative schemes to profit from the mayhem.

Privatizing Iraq’s oil, ensuring global dominance for genetically modified crops, lowering the last of the trade barriers and opening the last of the wildlife refuges… Not so long ago, those goals were pursued through polite trade agreements, under the benign pseudonym “globalization.” Now this discredited agenda is forced to ride on the backs of serial crises, selling itself as lifesaving medicine for a world in pain.

*This column was first published in The Nation*

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The House I Live In

[Morphizm pal and investigative muckraker Greg Palast checks in with a self-conscious Fourth of July spiel. Patriots might want to click on another site...now!]

The House I Live In
America is a nation of losers. It’s the best thing about us. We're the dregs, what the rest of the world barfed up and threw on our shores.

John Kennedy said we are "a nation of immigrants." That's the sanitized phrase. We are, in fact, a nation of refugees, who, despite the bastards in white sheets and the know-nothings in Congress, have held open the Golden Door to a dark planet. We are not imperialists and that’s why Bush lies and Cheney lies and, yes, the Clintons lied.
Winston Churchill didn’t lie to the Brits about their empire: He said, These lands belong to the Crown, we own'm and we’ll squeeze the value from them. "Imperialism," as Karl Marx complained, was a good word in Britain, a word that got you elected in Europe until too recently.

Ignore the fey university hideouts of Europe. Go to Vietnam or to Brazil or to Morocco or to Tibet and you’ll ?nd the same thing: America's music, America's freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom of spirit and the heartfelt friendship of Americans for others have made the USA truly “the light unto the nations.” Americans are not liked worldwide, but loved-sometimes I ?nd that weird, but it’s true-and that drives Osama to bombs and madness.

We are a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the cause that all men and women are created equal. It’s silly and precious to point out that these ideals have been mangled, abused, ignored and monstered by those with plans to make us an empire. We know that.

America is indeed exceptional. That's not a boast, that’s a job we have to do. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson burdened us with that exceptionalism in crafting the most important international law signed up until the Geneva Convention: The Alien Torts Act, in which the USA takes onto itself the right to bring civil penalties against any act of torture, political murder and piracy that occurs anywhere in the world. It is now being used in suits brought against Chevron Oil in Ecuador and against IBM for the death of slave laborers in Nazi Germany.

Damn right America is exceptional. It is America that de?antly walked out of the ?rst “world trade organization,” known as the British Empire, announcing, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and are ENDOWED BY THE CREATOR with INALIENABLE rights, and AMONG THESE are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Now, think about that. These rights don’t come from Congress or Kings or Soviets, they come from The Creator, that is, we are born free-and “we” are Sri Lankans as much as Minnesotans. Our rights are “INALIENABLE”: no one, NO ONE, may take them away, not the Ayatollahs of Tehran or Generalissimo Negroponte at the Department of Homeland Security or the kill-o-crats in Baghdad pre- or post- Saddam.
Will the snarling closet imperialists try to turn America from its cause and soul? Damn right they will. That’s why two U.S. military lawyers resigned from their posts at the Guantánamo prison camp. They wouldn’t put up with Bush-niks tearing up their Constitution. ("We the people" own it, not "them the Republicans.") In Iran, these two guys would have been shot, in Britain arrested. In America, Bush fears them-that their story would come out-as it did. Only in America could that happen.

No question, the USA holds itself exempt from the legal standards of this world-which are execrable. Whose standard should we adopt? China’s torture standard? Britain’s Secrecy Act as a standard? Switzerland’s Nazi-money-protection standard?

Only in America would a Lyndon Johnson order federal troops to protect Black school kids' right to attend class. You don’t have to tell me that Johnson then ordered the slaughter of three million Vietnamese-I know, I went to jail to oppose it. But go to Vietnam today and ask what people they most admire? Mention Russians, they laugh; mention Chinese, they may hit you; mention Americans and they say (to my astonishment, I’ll admit), “We love Americans.”

They don’t love Bush. That’s because George Bush is not an American. Look, I didn’t think much of Bill Clinton, and he dropped into some of the worst quasi-imperial habits of the New World Trade Order. But Clinton was also more popular worldwide than the pope and pizza combined because he represented that American sense of giving- a-shit, empathy and sincere friendship which are hallmarks of America’s Manifest Destiny.

Yes, America does have a Manifest Destiny-to Let Freedom Ring-which the evil and greedy and pernicious would twist into a grab for land and resources and ethnic cleansing. And so the Manifest Destiny of the journalists in our shitty little of ?ces in New York and London is to expose these motherfuckers.

Ronald Reagan said, "America is the shining city on the hill." And he hated it, doing his best to turn it into a dark Calcutta of the helpless. And when that didn’t work, George II tried to drown us in the Mississippi.

Go back to Taos, New Mexico, Voting Precinct 13. What you’ll ?nd there is Pueblo Native war veterans who raise the ?ag every day and will ?ght and die for it knowing full well that the ?ght must also be taken to the pueblo’s racially biased voting booths.

Howard Zinn, a shining historian on our hill, reminds us, "It should be understood that the children of Iraq, of China, and of Africa, children everywhere in the world, have the same right to life as American children."

Damn right, they do. That’s what Jefferson meant by "inalienable."

And they won’t get their rights to life and liberty from Osama's Caliphate of oil states or China’s money-crazed "Communism" nor half of Africa’s neo-colonial presidential Draculas or the puppet princes installed today in Iraq by George Bush.

Bush is so far away from his refugee loser roots that he just doesn’t get what it is to be American. So he steals the one thing that every American is handed off the boat: a chance. When they take away your Social Security and overtime and tell you sleeper cells are sleeping under your staircase, you don't take a chance, you lose your chance, and the land of opportunity becomes a landscape of fear and suspicion, an armed madhouse.

You want to say that George Bush is an evil sonovabitch? I’d go further: he’s Un-American.

And that’s why he lost the election. Twice.

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The Fourth Is Over? Let's Kill Iran!

What a way to celebrate American independence. Another lethal war, another nail in the nation's coffin. Seymour Hersh breaks it down. Be afraid. Very fucking afraid.

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Happy Birthday, Morphizm!

Seven years ago, I started a crappy site that turned into a career in journalism. From early interviews with Jello, Viggo and Fugazi to today's CSS overhaul, still in progress, it's been a blast. I had no idea that buying and coding your own site could lead to gigs writing for Wired, Huffington Post, Salon, AlterNet, Rolling Stone and more, but here I am. Thanks, Morphizm.

So, what comes next? We're ramping up a CSS redesign that will feature much simpler navigation and rich media content. We'll also have a slew of independent blogs from our usual cast of characters, including Greg Palast, Naomi Klein, Tom McNichol and many more. We'll have a dedicated video show, radio station, store and resources for those looking to recreate their internet experience and stay informed. As always, we'll offer an alternative to the stoopid media out there, and bring you uncomfortable but much-needed clarity on the world-at-large. Later on, we'll have books and more productions as well. By the end of 2008, you might not recognize Morphizm.

But we will recognize you. Thanks for reading these last seven years. Here's to 700 more.

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Is Google Evil For The Environment?

Doubtful. But I asked them and Treehugger anyway, for AlterNet:

Google: Good or Evil For The Environment?
Now that it has unseated Microsoft as Earth's most recognizable and influential technology behemoth, Google has gone from a crowd-favorite upstart to an octopus multinational beneath the bull's-eye. As such, its innovations in search, advertising, video, open sourcing, communications, computing and beyond have taken a backseat to legitimate concerns over everything from its impossible motto, "Don't Be Evil," to its carbon footprint. And while the former is a terminological chimera, the latter is an increasing problem for a planet that is practically warming by the day, due to a lethal combination of explosive global growth, rampant carbon dioxide emissions and lackluster world policy.

To mangle the cliche, the evil is in the details... MORE @ ALTERNET

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Golden Animals Free Yr Mind

More musical spiel for Metromix! This one is as groovy as Jim Morrison's skull:

Golden Animals
Free Yr Mind and Win a Pony
As an experimental mash of yesteryear's sonic signatures and today's technological upgrades, Golden Animals' smoky effort is a timeless pleasure. Deep-fried stomps like "Queen Mary (The Flop)" could have easily come off of Elvis' "Jailhouse Rock," except when the near-metal riffage pops in for a nice surprise. The country lean of "Ride Easy" feels like Johnny Cash jumped out a window and landed on Pavement. The blue bounce of "Steady Roller" could have crept out of Nick Cave or Alejandro Escovedo's underwear drawer, if it wasn't hiding out with the Soledad Brothers. There's a lot going on here, is what we’re saying, but a degree in pop music history isn't necessary if you just want to lie back and let Golden Animals retrofitted Americana roll over you like a runaway train. Hop the boxcar, bums! MORE @ METROMIX

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HuffPosted! Great Depression Goes Viral

Hey pals, my post on our Ponzi economy's return to the Great Depression has landed on the fine pages of The Huffington Post. Load up the guns and comment at will! The more, the better. Just like money.

The Great Depression Goes Viral
The first thing we need to admit to ourselves is that the war and the economy are the same issue, not separate ones. The next thing we need to to is unplug ourselves from the chatter, and plan for the future. Which means turning off Fox, CNN, MSNBC or talk radio, if only those programs that bypass research for retardation. Or redundancy, if you are offended by the metaphor. The point is the point, which is a tautological way of saying you are wasting your time if you are getting your news from people who are not only giving you not just their opinion, but the worst possible opinion available in
contemporary media... MORE @ MORPHIZM

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Alkaline Trio Are Getting Old

July is here. Bring the heat! Let's start with a spiel for Metromix:

Alkaline Trio
Agony & Irony
Like their peers in Green Day, another similarly engineered punk and pop crossover threesome, Alkaline Trio have turned over a decade's worth of work into a comfortable career of making noise and friends. They even made the jump to a major label, having left Vagrant and landed at Epic, and starred on teen television drama The Hills... MORE @ METROMIX

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I Called It! The Great Depression

Last July, I took a novice's look at hedge funds, housing, gambling and America's ass-backwards foreign policy and declared what I thought to be the obvious. The spiel landed on Alternet in the form of a supposedly sensational article called The Crash of 1929: Are We on the Verge of a Repeat? I thought it was a hoot. Others thought I was high.

But it ended up being obvious. June gloom just killed off the second quarter of 2008, and the Great Depression is finally going viral in the mainstream media. CNN Money's closing report on today's trading dropped it three times, including once in the subheadline. And they're not alone either. The economy has become the top election issue of the year, and chatterheads like Jim Cramer and Lawrence Kudlow are looking worse while doom prophets like Naomi Klein and James Kunstler are looking cooler by the day.

Which totally rules: The more people unplug from the Kool-Aid machine, the faster we can get past disaster capitalism and onto the next stage in our economic evolution, which is alternative energy. I say economic evolution, but it might as well be our salvation. If we don't get off gas fast, we're headed to a junkie's end. Ever seen one? Not pretty.

The first thing we need to admit to ourselves is that the war and the economy are the same issue, not separate ones. The next thing we need to to is unplug ourselves from the chatter, and plan for the future. Which means turning off Fox, CNN, MSNBC or talk radio, if only those programs that bypass research for retardation. Or redundancy, if you are offended by the metaphor. The point is the point, which is a tautological way of saying you are wasting your time if you are getting your news from people who are not only giving you not just their opinion, but the worst possible opinion available in contemporary media.

See the games for what they are, and help those around you see them as well. We're trillions in the hole since Bush took office. Let's make sure the next president knows his way around a game theory, or two.

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Post Up! Prescrips: Rock's New Coke and Heroin?

Man, the spring cleaning is almost done. July to December are going to look so different, once these piles are decimated. Speaking of decimated, I recently posted a heads-up at Wired on Aerosmith, rehab and why prescription meds are the new heroin:

Prescription Drugs: Rock's New Coke and Heroin?
Aerosmith screamer Steven Tyler was once the poster boy for drug addiction in the music biz. In fact, Tyler and Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry were known as the "Toxic Twins" for their heroin and sundry other habits. But Tyler has a new drug, and this time it's over-the-counter.

While promoting the release of Guitar Hero: Aerosmith at the Hard Rock Cafe in New York on Friday, Tyler told the Associated Press that he recently checked back into rehab not to kick heroin or coke, but prescription meds and sleep aids. After undergoing surgery and physical therapy on his foot, Tyler couldn't hack the pain and admitted himself into a facility for help... MORE @ WIRED

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